SEO Ethics

Hi There - Does anyone know anything about this company:

http://www.itechdevelopers.com/

I am wondering if there services are unethical. I have a client who I think has been ripped off. -Beth

Never heard of them. But their site looks like crap...
Just curious... Why did your "friend" decide to go with them?

I think they were tricked into it and thought the 48 hour guarantee was appealing. -Beth

I hope so too. What a joke.

They use to go by www.iteq.tv and a competitor (I know them personally, through family friend) has used them for the last 2 or 3 years.

They use doorway pages (cloaking) in a way that looks cheasy for results with lame sentences using key words.

I found it quite funny that they have lost much of their google listings after florida that have not returned even after I warned them about cloaking. (Am I too nice to warn my competitor??!??!)

They now have high listings in yahoo with these cloaked pages and I hope yahoo catches onto this kind of junk. :-x

-Debunked

How do you find out the urls of the cloaked pages? Thanks for the info. -Beth

I was just called by this company and I could not get the sales woman to tell me anything that made sense. She just kept saying we would get top placement on sponsored listing on yahoo and other top engines.

I kept telling her that what they are showing is Overture.com results and she asked me at one point if we do PPC after already saying we use overture!!!

I was really getting frustrated because I figured there had to be another explaination to them representing the sposored listings. Can anyone fill me in???

She even sent me an e-mail and here it is:
We are a search engine placement service:

What garbage. Not only are they ripping people off but they are also lieing to them!! You dont even have to submit sites anymore.

I contacted the company and they didn't even know that Google is not providing listings to Yahoo any longer. Any way to determine the doorway pages. -Beth

Yeah if your PPC amount and conversion is high enough you'll show up as a sponsored link. Works best with 2 or 3 word phrases. Your monthly charge is what takes care of the cost.

They click on the link acouple of times to build up the conversion rate and you'll be number 1, 2 or 3.

4 phrases will cost under 2 or 3 bucks or so everyday (about 30 bucks max a month due to weekends and low days). And since they target specific words it's most likely setup as an exact match to minimize unwanted clicks that you would get with broad or phrase matches. So users will have to type in "blah1 blah2" in that order and no extra keywords so when you complain that "blah1 blah2 blah3" doesn't work they'll say "you didn't purchase that phrase, you can for 50 bucks more a month"

Extreme fraud.

Not unless you know a customer and keywords they are targeting. I'm sure you can stumble upon them if you looked but that like looking for a needle in a hay stack.

Hi - If you do a search on Google for:

.itechdevelopers.com

you'll see that the page count is 396. If you select "repeat the search with the omitted results included" on the last page, you can see all the pages. When getting through them most all redirect to the home page of

www.itechdevelopers.com

I think this would be considered spam on googles guidelines. -Beth

check also the alltheweb results

I've gotta say, "outting" firms online is a risky move. By all means, discuss theoretically a company that is using XYZ technique. Heck, even use a lot of their literature without names and numbers, but be very very careful how far you go.

Slander, libel and lawsuits in general are going to be costly and time consuming. In fact, the mods should take extreme care in even allowing the comapnies URL / name to be published. We live in litigous times.

This is in no way a justification, defense or comment on the company concerned. Instead, it just a warning that naming names and outting people can have dangerous consequences.

Having said that, the best bet for anyone that feels they have been ripped off is to go back to "old skool" offline thinking: either contact a lawyer or your state / territory's cunsumer watchdog / advocacy group. A sternly worded letter from a lawyer might be enough to get some action.

Also, take down ANY and ALL work such a company did that is live on a website. If you keep their work live, that is tantamount to admitting you got what you paid for and continue to use the service they provided.

Good luck, and I hope it all works out!!!